by Lewis Shiner
“I didn’t want to be the first to say it.”
“Well, it’s out there now. Jeff Cole and Sallie Rachel, together again for the first time.”
“Except your name first, because you’re the star. You tell me. You’re the one with something to lose, I’m the one with everything to gain.”
“I wish we had somebody to play the songs for. If only Dave were here…”
She couldn’t believe she’d said that.
“Oh, shit. Oh, Cole, that was so stupid. I’m so sorry.”
“Sallie. Sallie, look at me.” She turned her head toward him, wincing. “I don’t want you to stop loving Dave. You don’t have to take away from him to give to me. The more you give, the more there is.”
“Is that from a song?”
“I expect it will be, before the week is up. What about Columbia, is there somebody there you could send a demo to?”
“Columbia released me after Hearth.”
“Oh, hell, Sallie, I didn’t know. That was a great record.”
“It ‘didn’t find its audience.’” She let herself talk without thinking it through. “What if… we did it ourselves? Recorded the album, then found some indie label to release it on? We could get Luke and Rick and Rompetecla to play on it. You could produce it, Dave said you virtually produced Already the End. We could do a club tour to promote it, work the radio stations… Cole, are you laughing at me?”
“Never. But I’m too old to spend months on the road anymore. I’ve got my gardens now, and my cat, and I like sleeping in my own bed, now that the airplanes are gone.”
“I like sleeping in your bed, too. Nothing too strenuous, then. A night or two here and there.”
“Let’s get some more songs,” he said, “and we’ll see.”
The next day Cole brought out some fragments of his own, and they were working on them when the phone rang. Sallie kept playing while Cole went in the kitchen to answer it, and came back a minute later with the handset pressed against his chest. “It’s Steve from the Continental Club. Their opening act for tomorrow night cancelled. He wants me to do a solo acoustic set. Want to do it with me?” She lit up at the thought of it, and Cole said into the phone, “Have I got a deal for you…”
The Continental Club, it turned out, had been made over in the eighties as a retro joint—rockabilly, vintage country, roots music. To blatantly pander to their audience, they worked up covers of Elvis’s “Return to Sender” and the Five Satins’”In the Still of the Night.” They put two of their new songs on the list, three numbers from Krupheimer, Cole’s “Time and Tide” and “Already the End,” and tried to put them in a logical order.
The crowd went crazy when Sallie’s name was announced and they pelted her with requests after every song. If it bothered Cole, he didn’t show it. They loved the cover tunes, screamed during the Krupheimer selections, and despite Cole’s badmouthing himself, they accorded him local hero status when he sang his own material. Sallie warned them that it was their first gig, and told them about the new songs, and the reaction, given that they’d never heard them before, was terrific. They closed with “Return to Sender” and got called back for an encore, so they did “Quién será/Sway” like on the Tracy Chapman tour.
Steve, the owner, with his wild white hair and pointed beard, was waiting for them when they came offstage, grinning and shaking their hands. “Any time you guys want to headline, say the word.”
They saw in the new year at the club and Sallie had champagne and signed some autographs and then they drove home on deserted streets at 12:30. Sallie had her head on Cole’s shoulder and was holding his upper arm. “I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun onstage.”
“Me either.”
They let that sit for a while and then Sallie said the thing she was afraid to say. “I’m not entirely sure I want to go back to New York.” It was Thursday now, January first, 2009, and she had a plane ticket for late Friday morning.
“Don’t,” Cole said. He reached his left hand around to stroke her hair. “I want you here.”
“I’m besotted with you,” she said.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been besotted with me before. What a lovely word.”
“I need to sober up and think about everything that’s happened in the last week.”
“Sallie—”
She put two fingers on his lips. “Don’t. We’re taking this slow, remember?”
“Too late.”
It was too late for her too.
At the airport on Friday morning it was a struggle to keep from breaking down. When she finally pulled free of his arms and fumbled her way through the security check, she looked back and saw him watching her, like James Dean pushing sixty, shoulders hunched, skinny and alone, and every cell in her body wanted to turn around and go to him.
On the plane she listened to their new songs on her iPod and began to ask the hard questions she could no longer avoid.
Cole called her that night. “How was the flight?”
“Miserable. And I hate this empty apartment.”
“It’s empty here, too. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m thinking. I’m thinking very hard.”
On Saturday she toured her favorite places in the city. The West Village, where she’d met Dave and then chased him down Bleecker Street on a cold, blustery day like this one, was unrecognizable, full of tourists and chain stores. The boathouse in Central Park, where she used to come with her guitar on weekends in high school to escape her parents, was closed and the lake frozen over. Zabar’s was no more than a cramped little grocery.
On Sunday night she called Cole and said, “Let’s talk hypotheticals. What’s your dream scenario? Don’t fool with me, Cole. I need absolute honesty, here.”
“Honestly?” In his pause her heart stopped beating. Then he said, “The limit. I want to wake up with you every morning. I want you next to me every time I’m on stage. I want my address on your driver’s license.”
“Then we have a problem.”
He was quiet for a long time. “Tell me,” he said.
“I grew up in the city. I don’t drive.”
“If I’m not going to fool with you, you have to not fool with me.”
“Okay. Okay, if I do this…”
“Say it.”
“If I… leave New York and come live with you…”
“Yes. Please.”
“If I do, I want you to quit your job.” She rushed to fill the silence. “Dave left me enough money to be comfortable. I get sizable royalty checks, mostly from Krupheimer, but from other stuff too. I own this apartment, which is worth over half a million.”
“I’ve always carried my own weight,” Cole said, finality in his voice, the closing of the subject.
“It’s time you stopped,” she said. “If I’m going to pull up my roots to be with you, I don’t want to sit around the house all day while you’re out somewhere risking cutting off a couple of more fingers. You should be writing songs, and performing, and making love to me, not doing something a million other people can do.”
“If that was the case, my records would have sold.”
“That’s crap. Whatever time you owed for the crime of having bad luck, you have paid it, with interest. Your bad luck is over. Get used to it.”
“Sallie, I—”
“This is how art works. Sometimes you get a huge following. Sometimes you die in obscurity. And sometimes your work touches the right people and changes things. Maybe it heals the world a little, like you were saying. It’s not about how many people are listening, it’s about who is listening. And what they can do. In this case, what I can do is liberate you from your lousy day job so we can write more songs together than if you were pounding nails all day. Or am I reading the situation wrong? Do you like dragging yourself out before dawn to do menial labor?”
A long pause. “No. I hate it.”
“Good. Do we have a deal?”
“Can I th
ink about it?”
“Do you really have to?”
Another long pause. “No. No, I guess I don’t. How soon can you get back here?”
“I need a few days. I need to sell a baby grand piano. I need to talk to my accountant. There’s a lot of stuff in this apartment that needs to go. Why don’t you fly up here? Quit your job, get a cat sitter, get on a plane tomorrow afternoon?”
“Just like that?”
“Why not?”
“Are you going to boss me around like this for the rest of my life?”
“Absolutely not. Only now and then, when you need it.”
Having Cole in what she still thought of as Dave’s bed was a little weird, and the balance of power was different on her turf, but the ease and comfort of it was the same, and the sheer physicality, the constant hum of sexual awareness between them, the casual caresses and kisses, made her feel half her age—old enough to know what she wanted and young enough to expect to get it.
Cole had brought his acoustic and Sallie got them a Monday night gig at the Iridium, where they ran out of encores and ended up winging it through a half hour of oldies and Sallie’s hits, the audience loving the improvisation even more than the songs they’d rehearsed.
In March she arrived in Austin for good, a couple of days ahead of the van with her boxes. Her apartment was rented out through a management company, she’d sold most of her furniture, and Cole had built new shelves in the bedrooms and the den for her books and records and cds, and a shed in the back yard for their overflow. Both of them were feeling the riskiness, the suddenness. As she climbed into Cole’s pickup at the airport, knowing she no longer had anywhere to retreat to, it hit her hard.
“You okay?” Cole asked, hand on the ignition, not yet turning the key.
“Has it occurred to you that we might be crazy?”
Cole smiled. “Getting cold feet?”
“Not cold, exactly. Maybe just a touch of a chill.”
He handed her a small package wrapped in the Sunday comics. “I was afraid of that.”
She tore the paper off to find a pair of heated socks with attached D-cell batteries. She couldn’t stop laughing. She was still dressed for New York, puffy coat and boots, and in Austin the night was cool and tasted of spring. She squirmed out of her coat and pulled her boots off and put on the electric socks. She kissed him and said, “Take me home.”
In May, she dipped into her savings and paid for the studio time to record their album, all new songs except for “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” which had become Their Song, as if they were in high school. Luke and Rick and Rompetecla played on it, and when the money was right, she and Cole brought the band—or parts of it—along when they played out, mostly in the Austin area, sometimes for the corporate gigs that continued to pop up every few months.
Sallie’s manager got them a deal on Matador and Duet came out to very little notice in December, swamped by big Christmas releases from Rihanna and R. Kelly and Chris Brown. But the reviews were good, and they kept coming, and it made Best of 2009 lists from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and All Music Guide and a dozen others, and the same sales figures that would have offended Columbia made Matador quite happy. She got her money back and then some, enough to do another one when they were ready.
They had bad days, rarely both of them on the same day, and all in all Sallie was happier than she would have thought possible in a world that didn’t have Dave in it. Though they’d talked about marriage, they’d both been there before and didn’t feel like inviting comparisons. Cole said, “I want to choose you every day, of my own free will, all over again,” and that sounded good enough for her. She was still, more often than not, besotted with him, and he, incredibly, was still in awe of her.
Then, two days before the anniversary of her move to Austin, the phone rang in the middle of the afternoon. They were just home from playing the Midnight Ramble in Woodstock and hanging out with John Sebastian and Levon. They’d fallen asleep on the couch, Cole with his head in her lap. He jerked like he’d taken 110 volts and stumbled off to answer. Before she could fall back asleep, he was sitting next to her.
“It’s Alex,” he said. “His father’s dying.”
*
Until smu, any concerns Madelyn might have had about the dangers of getting one’s heart’s desire had been purely hypothetical.
The high points of the job, she admitted, were everything she’d imagined, of which the highest were the receptions for visiting writers at Marshall Terry’s house, where large quantities of wine and beer were required to keep the massed intellectual heat from burning the place down.
The low points were the rub. With the unelected presidency of George W. Bush, a new era of know-nothings had descended upon the US, where otherwise normal-seeming humans in public office proudly refused to believe in evolution, climate change, or science in general. Government funding for universities plummeted even as the economy took a nosedive in 2008. The outcry for universities to be run like businesses had, predictably, resulted in the same abuses as in the corporate world: bloated salaries at the top and austerity for those doing the yeoman work, as salaried professors were transformed into adjuncts, paid per class, and rendered unable to earn a living wage. Meanwhile, the majority of undergraduates, increasingly headed for mbas or law school, regarded the humanities as a waste of the time they could have spent binge-drinking or texting on their iPhones.
Madelyn hated to hear her inner voices fall into such easy, cynical generalizations on such a depressing, drizzly March day. In hopes of relief, she stopped off at the English Department Common Room before heading home. There she found Adjunct Professor Diane Travers staring speculatively at the burned sludge at the bottom of the Mr. Coffee. Diane had a deadbeat ex-husband, two daughters in high school, and a second job waiting tables on weekends; she and Madelyn had a friendship that was more cordial than intimate.
“I take it you are not my three o’clock,” Diane said. As an adjunct she had no office and thus met with her students under a tree outside Dallas Hall, weather permitting, which it currently did not. She abandoned whatever idea she might have had about the coffee and sat on the couch. “I don’t get it. I make appointments with these kids to try and help them get the grades their daddies are demanding, and half the time they don’t show up.”
“This kid just now in my poetry class,” Madelyn said, “kept getting up and looking out the window every five minutes. I finally asked him if he would kindly stay seated, and he said no, he was parked illegally right below the window, and he was watching to make sure he didn’t get towed.”
“Let me guess,” Diane said. “Brand new Mustang, right?”
“You called it.” smu’s mascot was the Mustang, so Diane’s prescience was not that remarkable.
“Damn car costs more than I make teaching here in a year.”
“This is the same kid,” Madelyn said, “whose father called me at home after his first paper to explain how important it was that his son get an A instead of the B I’d given him, though he deserved a C. I told him he would have to take that up with his son, and he complained to the Dean. It’s the sheer, unadulterated privilege of it.”
Diane gave her the “who do you think you’re talking to?” look that was so effective at withering her students. Because one part of her ancestry originated in Africa, she had spent her academic career being offered courses like “Crisis in Black and White” and “The Enduring Influence of the Harlem Renaissance” when her real interests were Chaucer, Donne, Dante, and Shakespeare. She had never said anything to suggest that she resented Madelyn’s full professorship, or her rich husband, or her ownership of the Shakespeare seminar, still, the tension was there, if only in Madelyn’s mind.
“Sorry,” Madelyn said. “That was thoughtless.”
“It’s not like I don’t sympathize. Half these kids, they’re just serving time.”
“Maybe I’m burned out,” Madelyn said. “Maybe it’s time to retire.” She lis
tened to her words hang in the air. “Dear God, that sounds dire. That’s not what I want to do at all.”
Diane looked at her watch. “Have you got plans for tonight?”
Alex and Madelyn tended to thaw frozen dinners when the impulse took them; eating together was the exception rather than the rule. “Not if I make a phone call.”
“Make the call,” Diane said. “I want to show you something.”
They took Diane’s car, a worn, well-cared-for, 15-year-old Buick. Diane refused to tell her where they were going, only that it started at seven and they ought to eat something first. Diane suggested Taco Cabana, which was fine with Madelyn. As they ate they traded their “superhero origin stories,” as Diane put it. She was a third-generation academic, her father having taught history at Hunter College and his mother in turn having been a math teacher at North Carolina College for Negroes, as NC Central in Durham was then known.
“Remember,” Diane said, “when we took for granted that we would all do better than our parents? I was born in sixty-four, early enough that I still internalized a piece of that dream. We lived in Harlem, but we would go to Lincoln Center, and Shakespeare in the Park, and Off-Broadway. I thought I was bound for Harvard, or at least Columbia, only I didn’t get the scholarships, and tuition at Hunter was free because of my dad.
“I was just getting my own career going at U. of Oregon when I met Gomer Pyle.” Madelyn had never heard her refer to her ex by any other name. He was a white, Southern ex-Marine who’d had a paradigm shift after the first Gulf War, grown his hair, and worked for various radical causes while crashing on other people’s floors. “Oh, he was good. He convinced me that I could have it all, family and career, because he had my back. Two kids and a Reno divorce later, I am as you see me now.”
They washed up and got on Central Expressway headed south. They were going against traffic and the rain had eased up. After they passed the downtown skyscrapers and got off Central, they might as well have been in another city as far as Madelyn was concerned; other than going to the Cotton Bowl and the State Fairgrounds, she couldn’t remember ever driving on surface streets south of downtown, let alone getting out and walking around.
